Today, it seems like any ordinary construction site wrapped in scaffolding, but the architectural plans reveal that a wave-shaped glass upper half is yet to be completed over the existing building. On the drawing board is etched a jaw-dropping, undulating structure that will tower up to 110m over the Elbe River.
This is the forthcoming Elbe Philharmonic concert hall, the centrepiece of Hamburg’s emerging HafenCity district. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss architects behind London’s Tate Modern gallery and partners in Beijing’s ‘bird’s nest’ Olympic stadium, the striking building is intended as a new metropolitan icon when it opens in 2012. And, to add to its significance, it sits on the northwest tip of the largest and most ambitious urban renewal project in Europe.
Some commentators have likened the rising Elbe Philharmonic to a new Sydney Opera House or Bilbao Guggenheim, but HafenCity’s Susanne Bühler points out that its origins are somewhat different. The decision already had been taken to convert 157 hectares of Hamburg’s now unused central port into a new inner-city district before the ‘wonderful vision’ for the concert hall got the go-ahead in 2005, she says. ‘In the HafenCity masterplan that was decided on in 2000, the talk was all of economic, social, cultural and ecologically sustainable reconstruction.’ However, even she is forced to admit that, ‘the Elbe Philharmonic concept crowns the project, and will create a new city landmark.’
A new iconography
It’s certainly a novel symbol from which Hamburg could benefit globally. Mention the city to many English speakers, and they often still hark back to the Beatles playing here in the 1960s, or they conjure up its red-light Reeperbahn district. Such clichés are usually followed by watery facts: Hamburg, laced with canals and situated on both a river and a lake, has more bridges than Amsterdam and Venice combined; its port is the second-largest in Europe, behind Rotterdam. The riotous Sunday-morning fish market – more a piece of theatre than a scene of trade – might also rate a mention from first-time visitors.
But while it has been overshadowed in the international imagination by Berlin and Munich, the metropolis on the Elbe enjoys an increasingly positive and sophisticated reputation within Germany. Coming second in size to the capital hasn’t made it an also-ran. Indeed, even in today’s straitened economic times and an era of drastic city-hall cutbacks, it remains much wealthier than Berlin. More millionaires live here than in any other German city, pushing the per capita income some 50 percent above the national average.
Home to leading news magazines and newspapers such as Der Spiegel, Stern and Die Zeit, Hamburg has long been the nation’s media hub. It’s Germany’s start-up capital, with 13.3 new businesses for every 10,000 inhabitants, and perhaps even more surprisingly an aerospace centre of excellence where Airbus planes are built.
Having joined the Hanseatic League trading bloc in the Middle Ages, the German ‘Tor zur Welt’ or ‘gateway to the world’ has been enthusiastically doing global business ever since. This has brought a fascinating interplay of financial wealth and multicultural influences to the city. On the one hand, there’s a certain conservatism among the ruling classes as shipping and media magnates drive their luxury cars home to the exclusive suburbs of Blankenese and Winterhude. On the other, there’s a kind of freewheeling liberalism as Turkish, Portuguese and other immigrants mingle with students and alternative types among the nightlife districts of St Pauli and the Schanzenviertel.
The city plays hard; it has vibrant theatrical and musical scenes, and thousands of diehard supporters for local football teams HSV and second-division FC St Pauli. And it works hard; one of Shanghai’s twin cities, it is the biggest entry point for Chinese goods into Europe.
For such a vibrant business centre, however, Hamburg found itself in need of more and more attractive office accommodation during the 1990s. As Berlin was rebuilt into the capital of a reunified country, it tried to lure some leading Hamburg companies to its new developments. Rather than lift the limits on the numbers of tall buildings, Hamburg retorted with HafenCity as a way of accommodating its growing business and residential populations. The city senate threw down the glove in a 1997 vote and formalised the decision in the 2000 masterplan to enlarge the urban centre by 40 percent over the next 20 to 25 years.
‘The fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain also played an important role in fundamentally improving Hamburg’s role in Europe,’ explains Bühler. ‘From being a city on the Eastern edge of the Western world it became a metropolis at the heart of a unified and growing continent. The HafenCity is the embodiment of this new reality.’
The Brownfield site on which the new district is being constructed was once the heart of Hamburg’s duty-free port. However, as the era of containerisation advanced, the land fell into disuse as larger modern ships stopped docking this far up the river.
Of course, other inner-city docks have suffered similar fates, and attempts to regenerate these areas have not always gone smoothly. The Canary Wharf tower at the heart of London’s Docklands, for example, went bust in 1992 before becoming a late-blooming success three years later. The South Street Seaport in New York City and Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz are both seen as more successful tourist and retail destinations than liveable districts. Amsterdam’s Eastern Harbour District was criticised as creating a ‘monoculture’ of rented social housing when it was first redeveloped in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Additionally, Hamburg faces a challenge of its own. The city centre boasts a fabulously ornate Rathaus (City Hall), and is also home to a spectacular so-called merchants’ building, the Chilehaus, which is shaped like an ocean liner. It has ritzy canalside shopping arcades, and scenic lakes. Yet anyone who has spent a weekend in the Hanseatic ‘harbourpolis’ knows that the downtown – not so far from HafenCity – already empties of an evening. While young revellers head for St Pauli and the Schanzenviertel, the more mature, middle-class set entertain themselves in Altona or Ottensen.
Mixing it up
Thus, from the outset, Hamburg has been very conscious of the need to learn from the mistakes of the past when building its new inner-city district. As well as giving the area a maritime flavour in keeping with the city’s commercial past, erecting flood defences and ensuring adequate transport links, head planner Jürgen Bruns-Berentelg – nicknamed ‘Mister HafenCity’ by local journalists – has continually emphasised the need for a diversity of uses.
There will be mix of residential, commercial, retail, leisure and cultural features, he says. Office space for 40,000 workers will accompany 5,500 apartments for up to 12,000 people. This makes the development 35 percent residential, a higher than average proportion that compares with, for example, 10 percent in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz (which Bruns-Berentelg also led).
However, it doesn’t stop there. HafenCity already has its own school and a new International Maritime Museum; a university is on its way. The development is divided into ten distinct ‘quarters’ with names like Sandtor and Dalmann Quay, Grasbrook and the Überseequartier (or Overseas Quarter) at its heart. Each revolves around green or other public spaces. However, to encourage the development of a sustainable community, none is exclusively given over to one use.
‘Apartments sit in direct proximity to offices, shops, cafes, restaurants and bars,’ says Bühler. ‘There is no purely work, shopping, tourist or residential district.’
Alongside diversity, ‘fantastic architecture’ is another tool Bruns-Berentelg is deploying to promote the success of HafenCity. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron are helping to shape the Elbe Philharmonic hall, but they are not the only winners of architecture’s prestigious Pritzker Prize involved in the new buildings here. Dutch ‘starchitect’ Rem Koolhaas has produced a vertical, staggered ring for the Overseas Quarter’s Science Centre; the Hamburg–America House in Grasbook has been drawn up by New Yorker Richard Meier.
Lesser-known names have also produced eye-catching architecture, including Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas with his dramatic cruise centre and hotel. What HafenCity’s planners only briefly touch upon is immediately obvious during any on-the-ground reconnaissance. As an urban regeneration project, it enjoys one strategic advantage rarely shared by its predecessors. This is that it adjoins another older redevelopment, whose presence should help weave it into the fabric of city life.
The Speicherstadt, or ‘Warehouse Town’, was the storage depot of the former duty-free port, until its neo-Gothic, re-brick buildings were converted in the 1980s. Many of them now house museums and other tourist attractions, from the Hamburg Dungeon and the world’s largest model railway exibition to a spice museum and ‘Dialog im Dunkeln’, a tour through darkness intended to replicate the experience of being blind. Others have been transformed into artists’ studios or office space for small businesses.
While this is not the same vision that planners have for HafenCity, the Speicherstadt does line the northern edge of the same archipelago, and already lures visitors across the first wide canal – a sort of Rubicon – separating the two districts from downtown proper.
It also offers a touch of authentic character with two of the city’s impossibly sweet ‘Kleinod’, or mini, restaurants. Only boasting around 20 covers, the fairytale Fleetschlösschen (Canal Castle-let) is a former customs tollhouse. Having fed hard-working dockworkers for decades, the Oberhafenkantine (Upper Harbour Canteen) continues to dole out hearty, reasonably priced local cuisine.
Although sometimes it seems today that all HafenCity has to match the Speicherstadt’s quirky ‘Kleinods’ are its many information pavilions, laying out its plans for the future, in fact signs of real life are starting to emerge. German software company SAP (System Analysis and Program Development) decided to move its headquarters to HafenCity as early as 2003. Since then, 200 others, including major concerns like logistics firm Kühne + Nagel have decided to join them. Pharmaceutical giant Unilever recently opened its striking new HafenCity headquarters, designed by German firm Behnisch Architects. Der Spiegel is also relocating to offices conceived by Danish architects Henning Larsen. The area’s Chilli Club has become a popular nightlife location, even if its restaurant’s reputation is rather mixed.
Bühler is hopeful about a future in which she sees the HafenCity not only reinvigorating the site on which it is building, but also bringing new vigour to the Speicherstadt and the inner-city, where today only 14,000 people live.
Recession-hit
Nevertheless, like New York’s South Street Seaport before it, the HafenCity development has coincided with a major recession and that is finally starting to cause some angst – at least for the time being. ING Real Estate, which is managing the development of the central Überseequartier in conjunction with Gross & Partner and SNS Property Finance, has confessed that companies are no longing ‘knocking on the door to buy the first building’. Even more controversial has been the role of the city senate. At the end of 2009, faced with dwindling tax receipts, city hall announced that it was embarking on a programme of cuts designed to save €1.15bn before 2013. Yet Mayor Ole von Beust, from the conservative CDU party, has tried to ring-fence funding for the Elbe Philharmonie and other state monies for HafenCity. Furthermore, in the middle of the year, the senate offered to move 800 workers from Hamburg’s central office from downtown offices on Klosterwall to HafenCity. This was even though, according to opponents, this meant paying a higher rate of rent.
‘All told, two-thirds of the unoccupied 50,000sq m will be rented to the city, to avoid disastrous vacancy levels,’ said Dr Joachim Bischoff, of the left-wing Linke party, at the time. ‘All of this is just to prevent HafenCity from seeming to be an even bigger mega-flop,’ he added critically.
The Elbe Philharmonie, whose total cost has now tripled to nearly €325 million has also been the subject of some public criticism, and hard decisions might yet have to be taken over City Hall’s pet project. For the time being, however, leading politicians are, if not exactly unrepentant then at least standing their ground. ‘The value of the Elbe Philharmonic structure will far outweigh the cost of its construction,’ claims Hamburg’s minister for urban development, Axel Gedaschko.
In the final analysis, too, this is not the only Hamburg reinvention of recent years. The sleazy Reeperbahn of old has been overtaken by a more mainstream entertainment district, where strip clubs are now joined by musicals and cabarets attended by middle-class couples. The even edgier culture of the St Georg area near the main train station is now overlain by a trendy, sophisticated gay scene. The once neglected waterfront west of the famous fish market has turned into a gastronome’s mile, lined with exciting restaurants catering to all tastes. And there’s even a grand plan for the deprived outer district of Wilhelmsburg. In short, the HafenCity project may be the most prominent symbol, but it is only one sign of a city on the move.